Posts tagged policy

The companies that asked the US government for permission to publish federal data requests last year have apparently lost their patience waiting for a reply. Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are updating their privacy policies to expand the types of disclosure notifications they give individu...

If you're arrested for overdue speeding tickets, is it acceptable for the police to search the phone on your person? How about if you're arrested for drug trafficking? In the eyes of the law, there is no difference: If you're arrested, you're arrested, whatever the crime. Isn't that an invasion of...

You know that page with a check box you haphazardly agree to on the way to signing up for various online services? The one with the hundreds (or thousands) of words of legal mumbo jumbo? Yeah, we do the same thing -- it's okay. It's because those pages, the Terms of Service, are boring, lengthy, a...

At some point several years ago Apple decided to offer a much more generous return policy for the iPhone than it did for other products, bumping it from 14 days to 30 days. Over the last couple of years, however, the carriers have begun shifting to a 14 day return period. Obviously this caused som...

Many PC users are used to getting free firmware updates, even after the warranty runs out. HP won't be quite so generous with its server customers in the near future, though. Starting February 19th, the company will only dish out system-level firmware updates to ProLiant server owners if they're e...

Many web veterans can share horror stories of friends and family who installed a few too many browser toolbars, some of them by accident. Google is clearly eager to avoid those disasters in Chrome -- it's instituting a new Chrome Web Store policy that will limit extensions to a single purpose. Fro...

Almost two years after it updated its privacy policy, Google is still facing the wrath of European watchdogs. The Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) has just ended a seven-month investigation into the search giant's practices and, similar to rulings in the UK and France, has deduced that Google...

Congress, the White House and the FCC's new chairman Tom Wheeler have all come out in favor of setting our phones free, but the telcos who can actually grant our handsets liberty have been slow to heed the governmental call. Because of that, Wheeler sent a veiled threat letter to the CTIA implorin...

Google occasionally updates its Play Store rules to weed out inconsistent or shady behavior in Android apps, and we're witnessing one of its larger clean-ups today. The company's new guidelines more explicitly ban device interference: titles in the Play Store can't modify settings or other apps wi...

A year and a half after Google introduced its new, "simpler" privacy policy, UK regulators have come to a verdict: Mountain View must now change that policy by September 20th or face the possibility of "formal enforcement action." In a statement, the Information Commissioner's Office said:
"We b...

No one really likes ads, but for better or worse, they're a sort of necessary evil when it comes to, you know, making money online. And while Facebook's not likely to stop sprinkling your stream with paid content, the social network announced a new plan today to tackle some of the more...questiona...

Google has been under the gun in the EU for a while now about its privacy policies, particularly in France, which is fairly hardcore about such matters. In fact, the nation's CNIL computer watchdog has just ordered Mountain View to change its practices or face an initial maximum fine of €150,...

The petition to reinstate the DMCA protection of smartphone unlockers has reached 100,000 signatories on We The People. As it's now hit the golden limit, the White House will have to issue an official response explaining its stance on the matter. The petition also asked that if the Librarian of Co...

The FTC has made online privacy one of its bigger missions as of late, going so far as to develop a full privacy framework that it hopes others will follow. Its counsel is extending to the mobile world with a new report full of recommendations for privacy inside apps, ads and mobile operating syst...

After upsetting users with changes to its Terms of Service, Instagram announced tonight that it's discarding some of them for now, rolling back the advertising section to the ToS in place since 2010. Reiterating his previous statement that Instagram never had any plans to sell user photos, company...

While some countries are insisting that web users hand over their real names, a German state has ordered Facebook to start letting people use fake handles online "immediately." The office of the Data Protection Commissioner in the state of Schleswig-Holstein said that Facebook's real name policy v...

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.
Like any group that runs an organized activity, raiding guilds need rules. Rules define expectations, set boundaries for behavior th...

Huawei has had an image problem lately among countries skittish about trusting a Chinese telecom giant with the backbone of networks that its home government might like to snoop. The company's Australian chairman John Lord thinks that's just paranoia, and he's planning radical transparency in the ...

The fact that ISPs are working with the RIAA in a bid to squash piracy is far from new. A leaked document claiming to be AT&T training materials, however, suggests that the operator is about to stop talking, and start doing. According to TorrentFreak notifications will be sent out to customers...

Pitching itself as the first trade alliance to represent the concerns of the online economy, the Internet Association lobbying group has just confirmed its member companies and policy platform. As suspected Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and Google are joined by other large tech firms, under the leadersh...